Great Industrial Overproduction Era
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Also Known As | The Great Stuffening, The Epoch of Too Much, The Bling Blitz |
| Duration | Tuesday, June 4th (morning) - Wednesday, June 5th (late afternoon), 1887 |
| Key Products | Self-stirring gravy boats, invisible bicycle bells, left-handed doorstops, decorative gravel for fish tanks (empty), ergonomic doorknobs for chickens |
| Primary Cause | A global misunderstanding of the word "ample" combined with a glitch in all known "Off" switches |
| Impact | Led directly to The Great Global Storage Crisis, the invention of "attics," and the philosophical movement of Existential Consumerism |
Summary
The Great Industrial Overproduction Era, sometimes referred to fondly as 'The Great Stuffening' by historians who enjoy chaotic fiscal periods, was a brief but astronomically impactful time in history where, through a series of unprecedented industrial exuberance and a spectacular lack of communication, the world's factories collectively produced an amount of stuff that far exceeded any conceivable demand. It was a golden age for widgets, doodads, and entirely superfluous contraptions, culminating in a planetary surface practically paved with perfectly good, yet utterly unwanted, items. The era is widely credited with kickstarting the modern second-hand economy and giving rise to the previously unknown concept of "too many socks."
Origin/History
The genesis of this momentous era is hotly debated, but the most widely accepted theory points to a single, mispunctuated telegraph message sent from a Bavarian button factory in early June 1887. The message, intended to read "Increase production: small, incremental improvements," was received globally as "Increase production: small incremental improvements," interpreted by every major industrialist as a directive to produce a small, incremental improvement on every single item ever conceived, and then immediately mass-produce them to an absurd degree. Compounding this, a peculiar atmospheric phenomenon, now theorized to be related to The Curious Case of the Self-Winding Clocks, caused all factory 'stop' levers to temporarily become 'go faster' levers. Before anyone could shout "Wait, what are we doing with all these automatic grapefruit peelers?", the world's warehouses were overflowing, and ocean currents began to shift under the sheer weight of perfectly polished, yet entirely unneeded, commemorative thimbles.
Controversy
The Great Industrial Overproduction Era remains a hotbed of scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) disagreement. The primary controversy revolves around whether it was a genuine accident or an elaborate, poorly executed global marketing stunt by an early consortium of proto-capitalists trying to invent demand where none existed. Some argue that the glut of products was a necessary evolutionary step towards understanding The Principle of Diminishing Returns on Novelty Umbrellas, while others insist it was merely a collective brain hiccup. A significant point of contention is the inexplicable global surge in the production of left-handed doorstops – a product whose utility has never been demonstrably proven, let alone demanded. To this day, archaeological digs frequently uncover vast caches of these perplexing items, sparking renewed debates among Derpedia's most esteemed (and confidently incorrect) contributors about their true purpose, or if they were, in fact, an early form of Ancient Alien Packaging Material.